Information visualization systems are known in the art. Information visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition.
The advantages of using visual metaphors to facilitate identification of relationships within complex data are increasingly being recognized.
Various visualization techniques are known in the art. A CIA Office of Research and Development project (“P1000”) eventually spawned software known as SPIRE and other text visualization techniques developed by the Information Systems and Engineering (IS&E) organization of the assignee of the present invention. This work, in turn, built upon earlier visualization work pioneered by the bibliometrics community in the early 1990's. Other existing visualization products are Analyst's Notebook by i2, Ltd.; Spotfire DecisionSite by Spotfire, Inc.; ArcGIS by ESRI, Inc.; Visual Net by Antarctica Systems, Inc.; and SmioMap by Entrieva.
In addition, there exists considerable prior art related to the graphical representation of hierarchical structures. Many of these use 2D or 3D radial layout approaches. These include the “cone tree” representation described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,295,243, titled “Display of hierarchical three-dimensional structures with rotating substructures.”
What is needed is a system and method that takes an integrated approach to visualization, for visually analyzing a variety of information types, or that addresses shortcomings of the prior art offerings.